Consider what the last two decades have offered anyone in news publishing in Europe. Print collapsed and took the twentieth-century newspaper’s business with it. Two American platforms swallowed most of the advertising market, then rewrote the rules of distribution every time publishers had finally adapted to the previous ones. Legacy publishers cut, merged and cut again. Across half the continent, owners with political agendas, and East of the Leitha, often governments themselves, bought up what was left. Then came a pandemic, the full-scale invasion of Ukraine and an inflationary cycle Europe hasn’t seen in a long time.
Into this shrinking, disrupted, politically exposed industry, no one in their right mind would launch a new venture. Professional investors certainly agreed: as we will see throughout this report, venture capital tends to steer clear of professional journalism.
And yet. Between roughly 2008 and 2021, in markets from Bratislava to Madrid, from Zurich to Kyiv, quite a few people did exactly that. This study follows twenty-one of them: digital-first, independent, public-interest news outlets that have reached financial viability and some are now profitable at scales their founders did not dare put in the original business plan.
Figure 1›When they started
Founding year of the 21 ventures, 2008–2021This report is an exploration of the capital stacks of European publishing: what these ventures were built with, who paid for it, what the money bought and what it returned. But before we start counting, we should meet the founders and understand what drove them toward this booming, highly lucrative sector.
Four reasons to do an unreasonable thing
Most of the founders in this sample were not romantics eager for new adventure. Almost every launch traces back to something concrete: a newsroom that became impossible to work in, a kind of journalism nobody was producing, a product that looked like people would pay for it, or a hobby that had outgrown its volunteers. We identified four, somewhat overlapping routes.
Figure 2›Four founding routes
Classified by dominant trigger, not exclusive motiveBecause staying was impossible
The most dramatic cluster was founded under pressure, usually political, and tied to ownership.
When the financial group Penta moved into the ownership of Petit Press, publisher of the Slovak daily SME, editor-in-chief Matúš Kostolný resigned along with his deputies, and more than forty colleagues followed them out the door to launch Denník N. They were not looking to become entrepreneurs, but for a way to keep doing their jobs without their new owner. 444 was born of the same pressure in Hungary: its founders left Index amid mounting concerns over the publisher’s independence and spent nearly two years assembling a launch in a market where backing an independent news site was already an act of courage. The Kyiv Independent compressed all of it into weeks: around twenty former Kyiv Post staffers launched a new outlet almost immediately after their owner dismissed the newsroom, with a full-scale invasion gathering on the border and English-language coverage of Ukraine about to matter more than ever.
OKO.press is a surprising variation on this theme. Its founders, veterans of Poland’s independent press, and their backers built the outlet in 2016 explicitly because, as OKO’s chief editor, Magdalena Chrzczonowicz, told us, they feared Law and Justice would do to Polish media what Orbán had done to Hungarian media: close down or capture the private and independent press. OKO was designed as the fallback vehicle before the takeover attempt, not after it. Nobody involved quite expected it to still be standing a decade later.
Most defensive founders inherited important assets: a working newsroom, public recognition and reader loyalty transferred from the previous institution. They had a compelling origin story, in which a group of established journalists chose principle over security and walked away together. That story can be extraordinarily powerful, giving audiences and investors a clear reason to believe in the venture before the new outlet itself has had time to prove anything.
Because nobody else would build it
The second group founded out of frustration with markets they considered calcified: conservative incumbents, little digital innovation, whole categories of journalism going unproduced. Nobody had pushed these founders out. They started the venture because what they wanted to make did not exist.
David Schraven had run investigations inside the WAZ group and concluded that Germany needed what he calls a “third branch” of journalism: nonprofit, local-first; CORRECTIV was founded to prove that a different financing model for public-interest journalism could work at all. Mediapart’s founders built the independent digital daily that legacy publishing would not. De Correspondent proposed a different relationship between journalists and members; Krautreporter, a reaction to the decline of quality journalism in Germany; Republik, an explicit answer to the concentration of Swiss publishing; elDiario.es, a journalist-owned publication in a market of compromised incumbents.
Because it looked like a business
In the third cluster there are ventures where the commercial proposition was present at conception, not discovered later in therapy.
Zetland’s leadership is refreshingly unembarrassed about this. The company treats capitalism, in CEO Tav Klitgaard’s telling, as a perfectly functional tool for making journalism work: build a product people pay for, and the money finances the mission. Telegram is the most straightforwardly entrepreneurial start in the whole sample: in 2015, just as six years of recession was ending in Croatia, CEO Miran Pavić and his brother acquired the neglected company behind the legacy portal Net.hr (a legal entity, a domain and residual traffic) and financed the new brand with their own money and a bank loan. Contexte was designed around a defined professional market: people who follow French and EU policy for a living, whose employers pay for information.
Editorial purpose and commercial opportunity were not opposites for most ventures in our cohort, but for this cluster, the business case was the starting point. For the defensive founders, the business was the consequence, the thing they were forced to learn so the journalism could continue.
Because the hobby got out of hand
The fourth route is the smallest and the gentlest. El Orden Mundial began around 2012 as a blog run by Spanish students of international relations; years of publishing, an accumulating audience and, eventually, interest from a national radio program pushed the group to write a business plan and crowdfund €40,000. Tsüri began as a volunteer local publication in Zurich, a Facebook page, a homemade WordPress site, no salaries, no legal entity, and incorporated only after eighteen months, when the workload could no longer be carried for free. In both cases the publication existed long before the company; incorporation was simply what it took to keep going.
The classification is by dominant trigger, not exclusive motive. Mediapart’s frustration had an unmistakable press-freedom edge; Telegram, the most commercial start in the sample, later sought an international investor partly as insulation against political pressure. Dossier sits almost halfway between the missing institution and the defensive route. It began when Florian Skrabal’s investigation into media corruption went unpublished by his mainstream employer: “Nobody’s going to publish on media corruption in Austria,” he concluded, “because everybody’s in it,” but it was also a response to a conservative media market with little digital innovation and no independent investigative institution of its kind.
No dorm rooms
Since probably Mark Zuckerberg and The Social Network, the popular image of a startup has become a group of nineteen-year-olds in a dorm room building something that will conquer the world before anyone has learned their names. It is a misleading picture of startups in general, and an especially poor fit for journalism.
That founder does not exist in this sample, and we would argue cannot exist in this industry. Journalists or editors were involved in founding nineteen of the twenty-one ventures, and most founding groups were built around substantial, sometimes decades-deep experience: an ex-editor of Le Monde at Mediapart; SME’s entire editorial leadership at Denník N, including a founder who had already built and run Piano Media, the Slovak publishers’ shared paywall; the veterans of Poland’s independent press at OKO.press; Index’s legendary editor, journalists, and part of its business side, at 444; a WAZ investigations chief at CORRECTIV; and established editors and publishers at De Correspondent, Zetland and elDiario.es.
A media company’s core product is trust, and that does not compound well on a startup timeline. Audiences follow bylines they already know and the people with money, as the next two chapters will show in detail, overwhelmingly backed founders whose reputations made an otherwise uncertain venture believable.
Telegram, launched from the business side without a famous newsroom name, understood exactly what it was missing: Pavić spent six months approaching around fifty candidates to recruit nationally recognized journalists who could lend the new brand public credibility. And the sample’s two youth-founded ventures El Orden Mundial’s students and Tsüri’s volunteers each spent years publishing without pay before incorporating.
Almost nobody founded alone
The ventures in this study were founded across roughly the past fifteen years, and even the youngest has already existed for around five. We were also looking specifically for organizations that had become recognizable newsrooms, not individual creators. The creator economy may therefore make the next fifteen years look different: some individuals may develop into diversified public-interest media businesses, while others may remain a fundamentally different kind of venture, built around one voice and one stream of work rather than an institution designed to outlast its founder. In this sample, however, successful journalism ventures were overwhelmingly collective enterprises.
Mill Media is the sample’s only clearly individual launch. Joshi Herrmann reported, edited, distributed and financed the first title himself, and even he started building a team as soon as possible. David Schraven also founded alone, but he hired a team from the start.
Everyone else started in company. The configurations range from pairs (Telegram’s two brothers) through the modal small group of three to six (Follow the Money, Contexte, El Orden Mundial, Recorder, Zetland, Dossier, Mediapart) up to whole newsrooms moving as one body: twelve equity-holding founders at elDiario.es, some twenty ex-Kyiv Post staff at The Kyiv Independent, and more than forty departures behind Denník N.
Some teams were assembled for the venture, deliberately combining editorial, publishing, management, design and technology. De Correspondent’s founding group, which included its design agency, is the cleanest example, and Brief Media built its cap table explicitly around core capabilities such as editorial, technology, design and finance. Other groups were inherited: the departing newsrooms of Denník N, 444 and The Kyiv Independent did not need to learn to work together because they already had trust, routines and some shared editorial identity.